The people who make release possibles through their work often run unstable. Since stable isn't used, releasing stable remains an ideal rather than a requirement. People running stable are left to run either outdated or backported packages.

The point is, if stable is an ideal, the project needs more motivating factors to encourage people to work towards this.

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Many users of Debian are not developers and either do not or can not deal with running packages from testing or unstable. I use Debian at work and need a stable system. I cannot tolerate broken software and I must have security. Therefore I run Stable. Some developers do not seem to understand that many Debian users run Stable and have good reasons for doing so.

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I think a way to better stable would be a script that would install ALL the packages in debian, either stable or testing, and make a really comprehensive statistics (all colourful and that) out of it (eg. how many and which packages ignore the switch to bypass debconf). I think to have seen a package like this being developed in a post on planet.debian.org, but can't remember the name. Probably run monthly or 14-daily.